


amaranth, rosewood, sandalwood, ash

by Largishcat



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Falling In Love, Pre-Series, fast burn, non-linear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:00:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21829360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Largishcat/pseuds/Largishcat
Summary: He looked at the fine hairs on the back of her neck and thought that he would, if given the chance, sink into her like an open grave.
Relationships: Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 133
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	amaranth, rosewood, sandalwood, ash

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Megkips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megkips/gifts).



> The tag that I really wanted to add, but was too long is: _Vlad is Cautiously Sipping at the Respect Women Juice, But Still Has Weird Ideas About Love and Marriage_
> 
> Also, I’m playing very fast and loose with everyone’s backstories here, mostly because I did no research on the games at all.

It took a month for Vlad to propose marriage. 

Lisa was halfway inside the mechanical heart of the house, exclaiming and scribbling notes on an increasingly grease-stained notepad. She was effusive in her enthusiasm. Carrying on a rapid dialogue with herself on the brilliance of the mechanisms, asking questions which she then immediately answered, tossing compliments over her shoulder like they meant nothing. Oh, he really had been clever to think of this, his workmanship was so lovely, the cogs fit together so perfectly. A beautiful machine, she declared the beating heart of his home. The peak of engineering.

Her words ghosted over his skin like a warm summer breeze, and he closed his eyes and felt something inside him crack open.

"Lisa," he called out, causing her to lift her head from where she was stroking the chassis of his soul lovingly.

"Oh, is it almost dinner time?" They dined together every evening, Vlad's servants preparing the kind of hearty peasant food Lisa liked best after a long day of work. It was an odd, one-sided ritual. Watching Lisa eat with her elbows on the table, while Vlad delicately sipped a glass of blood. It had become a time Vlad cherished with all his being. The guarantee that even if they were occupied all day in different parts of the castle, they would see each other over the dinner table.

"Yes," he said, "but I had wished to ask you something.”

“What is it?” she asked and smiled. She always smiled at him so readily. There was something bubbling up from his stomach, like hunger or bloodlust, but also nothing like either one. 

“I…” The words failed him. Lisa blinked at him, perplexed.

“It is not like you to be at a loss for words, my friend.” She climbed down to the floor, wiping grease off on her already filthy dress. It still caked under her nails, black and ugly. His house’s blood. His blood. “What did you want to ask me?” she said, coming up to stand in his shadow, completely without fear. She smiled up at him.

“You _must_ marry me.” The words tore themselves from his mouth, coming out crude and rude and desperate. “Please,” he amended, “I cannot bear to miss a moment of your life. The thought of being unable to witness a single breath, to have a single word fall from your lips that I do not hear—the thought is of the utmost agony to me.”

He paused then, and if his heart had been capable of beating, it would have pounded.

Lisa’s mouth was slightly parted. The rich, bloody pink of the inside of her lip was almost obscene. For a long moment, the only sound was that of her rapid breathing as she stared, wide-eyed up at him.

“Oh,” she said, “okay. Okay, um, yes.” She frowned to herself, her lip between her teeth. Then she frowned at the wall. Then the floor. Then, finally, she raised her eyes back to his and frowned at him. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

When he kissed her, she tasted of the sun.

“So, what are you, exactly?” Lisa asked him, two days into their unexpected and confusing acquaintance. “You’re not a human man, that much is clear from your—“ She gestured towards his face, his pointed ears, the snake’s fangs that dented his lower lip. He smiled, showing them to her. She smiled back, one eyebrow raised, then turned away, allowing her gesture to sweep out and encompass the entire room. “And everyone says your castle has been in this spot for at least a hundred years.”

They stood together in his library. A huge, dim room with a ceiling that vaulted like a cathedral. Vlad had designed it that way. A mockery and a tribute both. A church built specifically to house all the knowledge that the _Holy Church_ found so threatening.

Vlad had long ago renounced God, but he had an appreciation for the beauty inherent in the swoop and arch of gracefully carved nave, the way stained glass turned harsh, white sunlight rich and deep. It seemed a pity to waste it all on the faithless, pitiless faithful.

Lisa had told him his library was as wondrous as she imagined the Library of Alexandria had once been. She said it without any of the fear or awe Vlad expected from peasants—mortals—she just stated it as a fact. 

Lisa, Vlad was learning, was always stating facts. When she wasn’t asking demanding and intrusive questions.

She was a puzzling student, but Vlad found that he rather enjoyed teaching her. 

Vlad selected a book from high on a shelf—it was rather dusty, he noted—and placed it on top of the already precarious stack in Lisa’s arms. She was beginning to tremble slightly under their weight, but if she was determined not to ask for help, then Vlad was content to be amused at her expense. “Five hundred years,” he told her, then swept past her, further into the stacks.

 _“Five hundred?”_ Lisa said, starting after him, then pausing to shift her grip. 

She balanced on one foot, using her lifted knee to brace the books as she drew them more securely into her arms. Vlad watched this little dance, feeling oddly charmed. “Why did you pick this spot? It’s a bit remote, isn’t it?”

She was correct that there were no villages or cities for fifty miles on all sides around his castle, but she seemed to think that he had built his home away from everyone. Instead of everyone building their homes away from him. 

“I did not pick the spot,” he told her, guiding her towards the wooden table that stood at the center of his library in place of an alter. It was a rich, deep red, carved in a single piece from the heart of a great tree. The surface of it scratched, scuffed, and stained from use. Out of all the many things Vlad owned, it was one of his favorites. “It showed itself to me and I built.”

Vlad had stumbled out of the smoke and fire of his final battle and found that his confusion had brought him to the edge of a wasteland. Brown and gray as far as the eye could see.

He’d stood, squinting into the harsh sun in armor that dripped red, over skin that dripped red, over a soul that dripped red. Behind him, his army and his enemies both burned.

He had walked for what felt like years, until finally he came to a dry patch of earth that looked like all the rest. There, he finally collapsed to his knees. The fresh blood on his clothes mixed with the dust, making mud the color of fresh bricks.

Behind him, everything he had been went up in smoke. His armies and his kingdom both. But he was as drained as the dry dirt he knelt in, and he had no tears to spare for them.

He would never cry saltwater, as a man did, again.

A single drop of blood fell from his lips and down, down to splash onto the dirt. The parched earth sucked it up greedily, and Vlad had known this would be where he made his home. In this dead place where nothing grew.

“That’s rather mystical-sounding for a man of science,” Lisa commented, six mortal lifetimes later.

Carefully, she set her books down. Vlad watched as she stroked her fingers down the cover of his rarest grimoire with the reverence of a saint. The palms of her hands were rough with years of work. Vlad imagined they must feel like fine leather.

The speed at which Lisa inserted herself into his life was startling primarily in how much it did not startle him. 

The flash of her hair and the bright echo of her voice should have been jarring in the silent, cold halls of his home—and they _were_ , but even as they seemed out of place, they didn’t. It was a maddening paradox.

The castle itself seemed to have none of Vlad’s qualms. It was not truly alive, Vlad’s home; it did not _truly_ have a mind of its own. It was as he created it—a fortress, a prison, and a sanctuary all at once. Dark and foreboding, silent and still for the most part, except for when the great engines churned to life.

They churned now. The sound was near deafening where Vlad and Lisa stood, battered and blown by wind and great clouds of steam.

Lisa’s blunt teeth were bared in a grin so wide it threatened to split her face.

“I’ve never seen anything like it!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, still barely audible over the noise. “How did you build this? You said it can go anywhere?”

Vlad only smiled, and reached out to steady her as the castle shuddered out of existence and back again a thousand miles away.

The engines slowed and quieted, falling back into slumber until they were needed again. Lisa looked as if she had been dragged backwards through a hedge. Eyes wide, clothes in disarray, pale hair resembling nothing so much as a pile of hay. She barely waited for the engines to quiet before she was running for the stairs. Vlad followed behind her, watching as twisting corridors designed to twist mortal minds straightened themselves for her, leading her exactly where she wanted to go.

She flew through the great front doors and stopped short at the top of the stairs. Vlad came to stand behind her.

“Oh,” she said.

All around them was the scream of birds and insects and the wet, green scent of growth and rot. The bottom steps were covered in muddy water. They would not be able to stay here for long, or the castle would be swallowed entirely by the mud, but it was alright for now.

“What is this place?” Lisa asked. Her head turned from side to side as she tried to look at every bright-colored bird, every richly green plant. “The air is so _wet_ , and _hot_. It’s like the steam coming off a cup of tea, but everywhere.”

Vlad did not feel the heat anymore than he felt the cold, but he could feel the ends of his hair curling. “A place untouched by man,” he told her. “I imagine this is what Eden once was.”

“Do you believe Eden was a real place?” Lisa asked, already recovering her inquisitiveness. She ran her hand back through her hair. The humidity had further disarrayed it. If it had simply been hay before, it was now a bird’s nest. “You don’t seem like the religious type to me.”

“I was known to be very pious, once,” he told her, which was true. He could not count the hours he had wasted praying to a God who had either not been listening or simply had not cared. It had been a point of pride, once. Being a king and conqueror who would, nevertheless, always make time for prayer.

Lisa nodded, accepting this tiny sliver, swallowing it down into the voracious maw of her mind along with everything else. 

She turned and started down the steps, eager to get her feet wet.

“Do you suppose,” Lisa said, her chin propped up on her fist, “that you could get me a couple of chickens?”

“What?”

“Well,” said Lisa, “I’ve been subsisting off your vegetable garden—which is very nice, by the way; I wouldn’t have expected you to be able to grow so much considering the quality of soil around here—but I’m getting a little tired of carrots and onions. If I could have eggs too, that would be just fantastic.”

Vlad had not been aware he had a vegetable garden. Which was very strange, considering he had laid every stone in the castle with his own two hands.

“I don’t want to trouble you, of course,” Lisa was saying, as if she had done anything but trouble him from the moment she banged on his front door.

“You need not worry yourself,” Vlad said. “As my guest, I will provide for your every need.

It took two weeks for Vlad to decide he was in love.

They were in his lab together, and Lisa had made an impressive mess over three tables. Open books, scribbled notes, specimens and diagrams, scattered in a way that was more madness than method. She was incandescent in her fascination. Muttering under her breath, hair in disarray, a smudge of charcoal on her cheek and one hand marking her place while she stretched herself, attempting to snag with the tips of her fingers another book that was just out of her reach.

Vlad nudged it towards her and she rewarded him with a smile, before immediately returning her attention to her studies.

He looked at the fine hairs on the back of her neck and thought that he would, if given the chance, sink into her like an open grave.

Weeks later, after she had agreed to marry him, she held a vial of mercury up to the light of a candle. She wore nothing but a robe of green silk which she insisted was too fine by far for someone who had accidentally set themselves on fire more than once while cooking, and which Vlad thought looked beautiful against her pink skin.

It was the small hours of the morning. Vlad did not sleep and, he had learned, neither did woman who was to be his wife. This was a matter of nature for him, and a mix of preference and dysfunction for her. Left to her own devices, she would work through the night and drift off into her morning porridge. Vlad was content to let her work as she pleased. Her tired flesh would force her to sleep eventually, but, until then, he had things to teach.

Perhaps, afterwards, they would fall back into bed together as the sun began to rise, and he would leave her tired enough to sleep through the day. There was something attractive about the thought. Lisa living always in the dark hours, with him.

“So,” she said, a smile playing over her lips, “are you going to show me how to turn lead to gold?”

“No,” he told her, plucking the quicksilver from her fingers. “If it is gold you wish for, there are far easier ways to get it.”

“But I don’t wish for gold,” she said, playing along. “I just want to know how it works.” Her robe gaped open at the front, revealing the soft curve of one breast. It was artless, an accident, but his eye caught there all the same.

“Everything in the natural world,” he told her, “is made up of base elements.”

“You aren’t going to tell me the whole air, fire, water, earth thing is correct, are you?” Lisa said with exaggerated dismay.

“No, there are many more elements than simply four. Quicksilver,” he held up the vial, “is one. Gold is another. But they are just two of many, some of which even I have no knowledge of. By combining these elements, we can make new things. Useful things. Things not seen in nature.”

“Fascinating,” Lisa said, and began to ask questions.

Hours later, when the sky was threatening then with the barest hint of light and she had filled an entire journal with her scribbled notes, she put her hand over his and said, “This is going to change _everything_ , Vlad. The _things_ I can do with this, the medicines I could make. This will revolutionize medicine, and not just in Wallachia, for the whole world. Everything will be different.” She snorted, amused at some internal joke. “Even we’ll be different, I suppose. We’ll be married.”

“I won’t change,” he warned her, and she had the gall to _laugh_ at him.

“I don’t need you to change,” she said, candlelight and mirth dancing in her eyes. “I’m trying to change the world, not just one man, no matter how impressive his library, how fancy his cloaks, or how big his castle. I don’t need you to be anything but exactly what you are.”

“Are you not always encouraging me to go out into the world?” he said. “To see and to learn?”

“Yes,” she said, holding up a finger, “but only because I don’t believe you can call yourself a scholar if you never set foot outside your own house—but that’s _doing_ not _being_.”

“You make the distinction?”

“I do,” she nodded. “I know most people don’t, but I believe what you do, where you were born, what your parents did, or what your station is—none of that has to define who you are as a person.”

“I find you perplexing and charming in equal measure,” he told her and was pleased when she flushed.

“Thanks,” she said, not quite managing to hide her smile. “Now, are you going to show me some alchemy or not?”

“I’m not a maiden, you know,” she told him after he quipped that perhaps one of the more graphic of his texts was not suitable for her _delicate_ eyes. Vlad had been teasing, but Lisa’s eyes widened as soon as the words left her lips. She snapped her mouth shut and hurriedly looked down at the book between them. As it was open to a woodcut print of a woman engaged in coitus with a stag, this seemed like a poor way to calm herself down.

“Oh?” Vlad said, cocking an eyebrow. Lisa’s eyes flicked up to his face, then back to the table. Vlad watched, fascinated, as blood began to rise in her cheeks.

Lisa stiffened her shoulders and looked up at him, a grim set to her mouth. “No one was going to marry me, anyway,” she said with false casualness, “I was too educated for it, even before rumors spread that I was a witch. So I figured, well, why not? I always liked experiments.”

“And how did you find your carnal experiments?” Vlad said. A mortal would not have seen her flinch, it was nothing more than the smallest twitch in the muscle of her cheek, but Vlad did. It made him want to press harder against the tiny wound she had let him see, to make the blood well up. “Were they… satisfactory?”

Her nostrils flared. He expected her to splutter or storm off, but she was forever challenging his expectations. Instead, she answered calmly, “I found them to be a distraction at best. Ultimately, not worth the risk of pregnancy and disease.”

Sometimes, Vlad could smell the tangy scent of interest from her. He smelled it now, even as she stared him down, daring him to push too far. 

Vlad inclined his head, signaling his surrender of the topic. He had no real desire to be cruel to her, even if her pain was beautiful.

She surprised him by bringing it up again herself, twenty minutes later as she carefully strained a concoction of willow bark and mulberries through cheesecloth.

“I wondered, you know,” she said, bending in half to put herself at eye level with the dripping liquid, “if perhaps it was better between married people, and that was the problem. There’s no reason _why_ that should be true, but I wondered all the same.”

“You are correct,” Vlad said, “there is no reason why that need be true. But one who has never been married would have no way to know either way.”

“Oh? And how many times have you been married?” She asked him.

Vlad paused. He had hundreds of wives, once, a very long time ago when he had been a king. He had snapped up any woman who caught his eye and hoarded them like dragon gold. Had prided himself in his collection of well-fed women, dripping in jewels and bright-dyed cloth and scented oils. Their wing had been a palace onto itself, full of soft skin and wide, coal-lined eyes filled with love and fear.

He wondered, idly, how she would have fared among their ranks. Would he have taken note of her, as he took note of the most interesting of his women? Would she have been a favorite, he wondered.

She would not have fought for his attention, like some of his wives, more likely to disappear into his libraries, which had once been a wonder of the world. Even with her pale hair, many of his wives had been more striking, some had even been as intelligent. Still, he thinks he would have noticed her.

He imagined her dressed in the fashions of the old country, in his palace, nose buried in his books. In many ways, it wouldn’t be any different from now. Only then Lisa would be one of his things, like the book, or the castle, and if he wanted to reach out and touch, it would be his right.

“Many times,” he told her.

“Oh,” she said. “I suppose I’m not surprised. What was it like?”

This was an odd question, but he was accustomed to odd questions from her. “I found it pleasant.”

“Yes,” she said, returning her attention to her experiment, losing interest in his non-answers, “men usually do.”

"Humans aren't so bad, are we?"

"You are all _precisely_ that bad."

“People can always try to be good,” Lisa said. “Or, they can try to be better.”

"I am too old to be good."

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, snorting like she knew anything of age. The way the years stripped a man down to dry bone until he wasn’t even a man anymore.

She turned away from him, and pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose before pulling down a book from his shelves in a billow of dust. It swirled through the shafts of late afternoon light like gold dust. 

He thought that she was quite possibly the most singular and exquisite human he had ever met.

Every moment he spent not in her company seemed dull and colorless, and every moment spent with her a flash of beauty like the wings of a tropical bird. He had become so accustomed to solitude and monotony, to boredom, that he had not realized that _bored_ was what he was. She had been a shock to the system, and how he felt more awake than he had in centuries.

He watched her squinting over a faded tomb in some dusty language _he_ barely remembered and _wanted_ with the single-minded desperation of a child. Wanted to never let his eyes stray from her face, wanted to touch her sun-warmed skin, wanted to press his fingers into her flesh, to see it dent. Wanted to stroke her golden hair, wrap it around his fist, wanted to make her smile, and make her frown in that way she had when was mulling over an idea. Wanted to bury his tongue inside her with her fingers tangled in his hair, her pulse in his mouth and her moans in his ears. In his fevered fantasies, she pulled hard enough to nearly hurt and told him exactly what she wanted until, finally, he drove her to incoherence. 

He’d fuck her while she was limp and panting, and she’d crest again twitching around his cock.

“Is this a real creature?” Lisa asked holding up her book, open to an illustration of a demon with long, grotesque limbs, and the ugly face of a bat.

Vlad reached out and ran his finger down the illustration. He had known the man who had drawn it. His bones were slowly turning to dust outside Vlad’s door. 

“Yes,” he told her, “although not one you will find running through the woods in Wallachia.”

“Oh?” She gave him a skeptical look. “Where, then? Hungary? Moldavia?” 

Vlad had only seen creatures like this once, on the border where the Ottoman Empire nipped at the heels of Wallachia like a hungry dog. There, he had watched in fascination as the earth cracked open and demons clawed their way to the surface. The man who was now bones had been young, then. He had had wild, hazel-gray eyes and a mouth full of white teeth that stood out stark against his dark skin. Vlad had thought him quite handsome, but he had known as a king that no one with that kind of power could be allowed to live.

“I saw them near Gallipoli,” he told Lisa.

There was not a priest in the world who would have married them, but it mattered little. Lisa did not believe in God and Vlad would have gladly raged war on Heaven itself if only he knew the way. They were wed in the old way, with words and sweat.

Lisa was warm as remembered sunlight and she tasted like blood everywhere. Her lips, her skin, her soft, wet cunt.

Hours later, after he had carried out as many of his his fevered fantasies on her willing body as could fit into one night. After all that, when she lay sleeping, exhausted and filthy with blood and sweat and her own juices, he stared at the moon.

_“There_ you are,” said Lisa of Lupu, pushing open a door that Vlad had been certain was locked. “I’ve been looking all over for you. This home of yours really is a maze, you know?” He saw a flash of silver as she tucked something back into the pouch she wore tied around her waist.

“Why have you,” Vlad said, “broken into my study?”

“Well,” Lisa put her hands on her hips, “you promised to teach me everything you know of the sciences, but all you’ve done is given me free range of your—completely magnificent—library, and shown me around your workshop a bit. Theory is all well and good, but I want to _make_ things. Do real experiments. Try out some of those fascinating machines you keep in your lab, but that I’ve never seen you use.”

Vlad did not recall promising her anything at all, but just as he had been struck the first time he had met her, he was struck again now by the odd charm that came with her gall. She was not the least bit afraid of him, despite the fact that snuffing out her life would be as easy to him as taking a breath was to her. She was the spirit of curiosity incarnate, and nothing seemed to matter to her but the pursuit of knowledge.

He had felt much the same way, once. Although, his studies, for him, had always been an escape. Something to disappear into for weeks on end. Work to quiet the places in his head that still rang with the sound of steel hitting flesh, and the crackle of fire. 

He lived a solitary half-life here. A dead man in a dead man in a stone castle full of dead things. He understood the need to keep one’s hands busy.

Perhaps, there were things Lisa was trying to quiet too.

Lisa tapped her foot, once. A little thump in the nearly silent room.

“Were you expecting me to jump up immediately and lead you to the labs?” Vlad asked.

Lisa shrugged, not seeming chagrined in the least. “I don’t have as much time to spare as you, Vlad Dracula Ţepeş. We can’t all be immortal demons.”

“I am no demon,” Vlad said, amused.

“Some kind of dragon, then. _Dracula_. That is what they all say in the villages surrounding your land. That you are a fearsome dragon, hoarding ungodly treasures. That, or some kind of witch yourself.”

“They flatter me,” Vlad said and stood. Lisa’s chin followed him up, as she kept his gaze. “What do you think I am?” He walked past her, into the hall. 

“I don’t know,” she said, falling into step beside him. “Whatever you are, you’re very interesting. I plan to learn all your secrets.”

“I hope you do.”


End file.
